As the Internet grows both in complexity and popularity, the need for effective systems, interfaces and methods for navigating and searching the Internet has increased. As a result of the Internet's growth, search engines such as Yahoo! and Google commonly return hundreds of pages of results for a single keyword search. Thus, it is becoming increasingly difficult for users of the search engines to navigate and find the information they are searching for within the very large number of search results.
In response, many search engines and other search utilities now provide keyword searches by category. For example, as set forth on Yahoo!'s home page, a user may select a search category (e.g., “Images”, “Video”, “Audio”, etc.) to narrow the results set of a search and more easily find the information he or she is looking for. Thus, if a sophisticated searcher selects the “Video” search category, he or she may obtain search results that include videos but exclude images and audio.
Although categorized searching helps narrow search results, many search engine users do not utilize selecting a search category for keyword searches. One reason for this is that many search engines restrict category selection to a single part (e.g., the top or bottom) of what may be a very long web page. Even sophisticated search users may find navigation to the category selection part of a web page time-consuming or distracting. Another reason that search engine users do not utilize categories for keyword searches is due to many search engines restricting category selection to parent or top-level web pages. Thus, a search engine user who navigates away from the parent or top-level web page may find it impossible to search by category. As a result, these users may be frustrated by the shear volume of results generated by simple keyword searches and they may blame their frustration on the quality of the search engine or search engine provider.